What Kills the Soul
by Phantomrose96
Summary: Clockwork presents Danny with the opportunity to alter a future that ends in calamity. With his options disappearing left and right, Danny resorts to a drastic, last-ditch effort to protect what he holds dear, but in truth, not everyone can be saved...


"Come. I have something to show you."

Danny looked up from his stack of glowing green tomes. He paused a moment to let the echo settle; when the ringing subsided, Danny held the speaker's eyes in a silent staredown. The ghost simply floated, arms crossed, and waited for Danny's response. Slowly, confusion knotted into Danny's eyebrows.

"You're…_showing _me something? Does that mean we're done with this 'seek out your own knowledge' garbage?" Danny highlighted his bitterness with a well-placed kick to the book tower, knocking them, half-floating, across the castle floor of Clockwork's lair.

"No, we most certainly aren't." Clockwork paused, shifting age to reconsider his statement. A hand ran tangent to his newly formed beard. "Well, you can be done with it any time you choose."

Danny scrunched his lips together. "Like it's my fault. You offered to teach me all this cool ancient ghost stuff. Not make me read." Danny swatted the final two books from the stack. "I bet these authors all died boring themselves to death with their own books."

Clockwork swept his staff out, catching the books in an ethereal green aura and shelving them one by one. "This should efface your boredom, trust me."

All Danny caught was the quiet, dark dread in his mentor's voice.

"Right…efface. And that's—?"

"It will dispel your boredom. This isn't the time for jokes."

Danny rose into the air, following the wispy blue tail that disappeared into the next room. "Dispel…Well I'm not a great speller to start. Does it…unspell my boredom? That doesn't make sense."

He stopped midair, thoughts vanishing from his head as he watched Clockwork calibrate the dial on his own portal.

"Dude…dude are you showing me the future? Finally? I thought you didn't trust me with that stuff."

"Never let a human tinker with his future," Clockwork muttered as he set the last gear in place. "That's common knowledge; it has nothing to do with how little I trust you." The last gear clicked into place, whining with a high-pitched shriek. "Don't take offense."

"Can I try next?" Danny asked.

"You most certainly cannot." Clockwork spun on spot, his composure slipping just slightly. The passion vanished from his baby face, which settled into a mature 20-something years. "I'm showing you this and only this."

"Like…it's a treat?"

"No. My hands are tied, that's all." He laid a wrinkled palm on the sloping frame of the portal, whose insides swirled with pastels and blotted greens. "I have just two alternatives right now."

Danny rose higher, watching with fascination as the shapes slowly took form in the blooming world.

"Either I show you this now, or you discover it when you go behind my back later." Accusation burned in Clockwork's young eyes. "This way, that little bit of spy work you had planned for later won't happen."

Danny opened his dry mouth in protest. "I wasn't…I wasn't _actually _planning to look around. I know what you told me about—"

"Yes, you were planning to. I see it plain as day." He shut his eyes in contemplation. "…Well, it's fading now, since I've chosen this path instead."

Danny scratched, half embarrassed, at the time medallion slung around his neck. "Well I didn't mean to go behin—but…you're not mad?"

"I'm not happy."

Danny tried for a half-hearted smile. "But you're still showing me this thing. You're not stopping me…?"

Clockwork spun one of the gears backwards. "Stopping you would require vast alterations to my own future. A bad idea."

Danny lost his attention in the swimming images in the portal. "…Vast alt—well isn't that what you do normally?"

The time ghost swept a hand across the swirling colors. "No, I do not normally do that. I avoid doing that as much as possible. Altering my own future—I blind myself to what happens next. For hours. For years maybe. As the ghost responsible for monitoring the flow of time across all existence, that's _very _ill advised."

A new scene spun behind him. "I've done nothing but alter the point in time when you see this future, and already the future I can see has nearly vanished. I doubt I could tell you much that'll happen for perhaps the next week." A humorless laugh erupted from his throat. "I can hardly get _this_ future to form."

Danny shook his head cautiously. "I still don't follow. If this is messing you up, why don't you just let me do what I was gonna do?"

"Because I decided to cheat." Clockwork spun the colors with his own aged hand. "The course of action you were going to take would have been…ill-advised. You didn't have the information you needed. It didn't end well for you."

"So you're…saving me by showing me this?"

Clockwork shrugged. "Hopefully I am. The future has become blurry to me—I've altered it, illegally."

"Well…thanks," Danny whispered, but his mouth was dry as sand. Fear pierced him like an icicle to his nonexistent heart.

A defeated hand fell from the portal, and Clockwork's gray-haired face turned back around. "This will take a while to form…The first time I interfered with you took years of planning…blinding my own vision and waiting for it to come back over and over. There were so many parts to consider."

Danny stared momentarily into his mentor's red eyes. He seemed to be staring into Danny's soul just fine. "This uh, 'blinding'" Danny ran his hands over his own eyes. "What does that?"

Clockwork turned to see the scene inside the portal crumble into nothing. "Playing my hand—I've disrupted the time flow. I'm not even trying to see the actual future, rather a past one, and it can hardly manage that." He knocked the end of his staff against the portal's side. "Time is like a perfectly calm river, Danny. I can appear at any given point and flow right along with it. I can take give past information to the future, yet the second I take information from the future and use it to alter the past," Clock ran his hand through the air, "I flow backwards, and I stir the river into a churning mess."

"That doesn't make sense," Danny muttered, eyes to the ground. "What about my parents then? And Vlad? I went way back in the past and you fixed it all just fine."

Clockwork smiled to himself as he focused on the newly-forming image in the portal. "I may have orphaned some outlying timelines for you to play in. The…world's most interactive movie perhaps. Had I let you mess in the actual root of the timeline, your mistakes would have been unfixable."

Danny fell to the ground, letting his legs collapse beneath him.

"I still don't get it."

"Think simulation. I couldn't have used that to deal with future self, since fixing an orphaned timeline would have done nothing to help the real world."

Danny turned the information over in his head, excitement melting into fear. "So then, how long have you been planning to mess with the future this time?"

"A couple minutes."

Danny's head shot up.

"I've known this would happen for quite some time," Clockwork added. "I just made the executive decision to effect my hand moments ago."

"What…what happened to 'years of planning'?"

Clockwork ignored the question.

"…And what if I mess up?" Danny followed up, voice weak.

The silence beat against his ears. Clockwork rubbed absently at the portal.

"Do you know what makes you a ghost, Danny?"

He blinked. "Like, the portal accident?"

"No. I mean by definition. What are you?"

His eyes fell to his gloved hands, which glowed faintly in the dim green lighting. "I don't really know. Ectoplasm?"

"In part…It is the electrical matrix, a blueprint to your conscience, that intertwines with ectoplasm. Simply, it might just be your soul caught in a web of ectoplasm." Solid shapes came into focus behind the portal, but Clockwork blocked the view with his body. "When you died, and your soul was torn into the open, the spike in ectoplasmic energy let your ghost form right then and there, superimposed on your own body, binding you to it."

Danny rose, trying to look behind Clockwork. "I guess that makes sense," he muttered without commitment. The swirling nothing lost focus again. "But I did…die?"

"In a sense."

Danny fell back to the ground. "Clockwork…what are you trying to show me? Why are you changing the topic?"

"I'm not changing the topic." His lips rolled inward, pressed between baby teeth. "Did you know humans run on trace amounts of ectoplasmic energy?" Clockwork watched intently as the shapes finally took form behind him. He swung his staff down into his hand like a ruler. "That soul of theirs…that spark. It keeps them going."

"I didn't…know that."

"It's hardly noticeable. No one does."

Danny inched left. "Clockwork…I want to see the portal."

Something close to pity crossed the time ghost's face as his attention moved to Danny, and he shifted aside, bringing the portal into view.

Three quick strides brought Danny eye-to-eye with the portal. His mouth fell open just slightly, confusion and desperate worry thrumming through his body as he made sense of what he saw.

A classroom was reflected on the other side. Only the wall with the blackboard was in plain view; the two sides converged at an angle, the back wall completely hidden. Pictures of Shakespeare and student-written quotes from Macbeth littered the left side cork board.

"It's Lancer's room," Danny said to himself.

But he had intentionally overlooked the focus of the room. Twenty or so students lay with their heads down on their desks. Sleeping, apparently. Lancer's slumped figure, its weight supported by the blackboard, toppled suddenly. Danny jumped.

Movement caught his eye. Fourth row, in the back, he watched his own double startle. The reflected Danny swung his head left and right, rising with a stumble from his chair as he shouted, unheard, to the sleeping room. No one budged.

Reflected Danny grabbed Sam by the shoulders and shook. Nothing. His hand slipped beneath her hair, pressed into her neck, until a sudden cry burst from his throat. Clockwork shut off the portal mid-sob.

The time ghost stared into the glassy blue eyes still fixed on the empty portal. Absently, Danny pushed his hand through the nothing that ate up the threshold's center.

"This…this is the future you're preventing, right?! T-that's why you showed it to me. It took so long to form…because that's not happening anymore."

Clockwork moved closer to Danny. "The Guys in White have come up with a rather clever anti-matter counterpart to ectoplasm. It's weak, poorly penetrating, harmless to stable ghosts, but perfect for wiping out ambient traces of ectoplasm that draw ghosts to the town." One hesitant hand found Danny's shoulder. "It destroys…trace amounts of ectoplasm."

Danny backed away from the empty portal, out of Clockwork's grasp, his hands to his head. "Okay. Okay I get it. The soul, it…Okay, so how do I stop this? Or how do you stop this?"

Clockwork looked down at his own rejected hand. "Do you know what the rebound effect is?"

"I don't really care," Danny muttered, rising up from the floor. He banged uselessly against the portal's frame, willing it to turn back on. "When is that thing happening? Who has the weapon? How do I find them?"

"The rebound effect happens because time wants to fall back into equilibrium." Clockwork quieted as Danny brought his hand down on the frame again. "Sometimes, when you prevent a disaster, the time flow lashes back. It was already headed to a future of calamity, and you just threw it off course. The rebound can be worse, compensating not only for your timeline, but the erased misery from the previous timeline you stopped." Again, Danny slammed his fist into it. "Amity Park was headed for calamity at the hands of your future self, Danny. I stopped that, and time rebounded." He threw one sad glance back to the portal, away from the side Danny assaulted, as though he were unable to even meet Danny's eyes. "And again, this sorrow is focused entirely on you. You're once more its focal point."

"So stop it," Danny whispered. "Or just tell me how to do it."

"What exactly do you think you can do?" Clockwork challenged, stone faced, as he took hold of Danny's wrist. "You tried, in the previous timeline, the one I just stopped by showing you this myself. You were captured, locked away in their basement, just as the gas was released. Everyone who knew you were down in that locker died." Danny tore his hand loose. "You spend the rest of eternity locked away, grieving. Ghosts don't move on easily. Do not go after the Guys in White. Do not try to stop them, Danny."

"Then I gotta get everyone out of there," Danny whispered into the empty circle.

"All fifteen thousand residents?"

"I'll warn them! Right now!"

"Most will think you're out to protect the ambient ectoplasm."

"They won't!" Danny rose up, his voice growing louder. "They trust me."

"Not in the future I've seen."

He swallowed, missing a beat. "I'll take them out of town myself. By force."

"You're deluding yourself."

Tears pricked the corners of his eyes.

"Then…I'll save my family. Sam and Tucker a-and…and Valerie and Lancer and Dash even and Mikey and everyone in my English class."

"It'll be too late if you wait until English." Clockwork put both his hands on Danny's shoulders to steady him. "We're juggling three timelines, Danny. In the first, the vision you and I saw in the portal, the attack takes you by surprise in the middle of class. Everyone dies right there. The second timeline involves you sneaking a look into your own future behind my back; you see this, try to warn everyone before bursting into the government headquarters. You're captured and locked away for eternity. Third will be whatever you do now; I can't see this future—I've interfered too much."

Danny shrugged his right shoulder loose "When does this happen, Clockwork?"

"14 hours, 23 minutes from now. 2:18 tomorrow afternoon."

Danny moved to free his left shoulder, but Clockwork held his hand there a moment longer. "In the timeline I just stopped, you had a third plan. If you couldn't warn everyone, and if you couldn't stop the Guys in White yourself." Danny twitched, and Clockwork clamped down more tightly. "Listen to me: A person becomes a ghost at their death if their soul is in turmoil the moment they die. Someone at peace with their own demise will never create a ghost."

Danny didn't acknowledge the advice. He shrugged Clockwork off fully, and disappeared like a shot into the green-blackness that consumed the ghost zone.

…

Within an hour, and just one detour later, Danny phased himself through Sam's second story bedroom window. He hovered, a shadow, over her sleeping body and jostled her awake. With a moan, Sam raised her eyes to him. Danny leant down to whisper urgently in her ear.

She blinked up at him, sleep clouding her dark eyes.

"They're gonna…gas the town?" she asked with a loose slur to her speech. She pawed at her bed until she found hold, pushing herself up into a sitting position. Her head still hung low. "They're gonna do this…when?"

"Today," Danny answered quickly. His eyes shot to the blinking 1:03 on her purple neon clock. "We gotta gather everyone up and go. You, your parents, Tucker's family, my family. If we don't—"

Something like doubt scrunched her eyebrows. "What about everyone else?"

Danny ignored the twist in his gut as he answered. "…Clockwork told me to forget them. We can't help them."

He couldn't read the expression on her dark face.

"Am I even hearing you right? Are you even Danny?"

"I…I DO want to save everyone, Sam," Danny answered, stung. He grabbed two mismatched boots off the floor and offered them to Sam. "But how'm I supposed to do that? Clockwork already told me they won't listen. And I can't lose you, okay?"

"Oh don't start with that crap," Sam snapped and she snatched the boots from Danny's hands. "Are you actually trying to value my life over the entire town's? That's not sweet. That's selfish; that's…despicable."

"We can _try, _Sam, but after 2:18 this afternoon—"

"Margaret Klein. She's my partner for psychology. She's a huge fan of Dracula and wears head to toe purple. She's one of the few people in this school I don't completely hate. Should I let her die just because she's not important to you?"

"No…of course not…" Danny faltered. He closed his eyes and shook the image of lifeless Sam from his mind. Hair swept wide on her desk, just brushing the tabletop over her open, glassy eyes. "Y-you're right. We'll warn everyone. We'll get everyone out of here, o-okay? Just, promise me if it gets too late and no one listens, we'll bail. Skip town. Promise me, please."

Sam set her feet onto the cold hardwood, pulling the boots on one at a time. "I'm getting my coat. Let's go wake up a town."

"T-tucker first!" Danny called weakly as she disappeared into her walk-in closet, light flicking on behind her. The careful omission in her answer rung in Danny's ear. "Tucker…Tucker will promise, right?" he whispered to himself.

…

Danny felt his breath catch in his throat. The skeptical eyes of a few-dozen people burned into him as he stood, half-floating over the make-shift stage he'd erected in the center of town. He felt Sam step up beside him just as the man in the pure white suit spoke.

"Phantom, I repeat my question: What could possibly lead you to believe our products can harm humans? What's your evidence?" The man kept his eyes hidden behind thick sunglasses, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Danny's attention flickered between the government agent and the ectogun in his belt.

"Clockwork—he's the ghost of all time and can see all futures—and…h-he warned me about it. I-I saw it myself. You're literally about to kill the entire town!" Danny's voice cracked as he saw the agent shift. His appearance in town had caught their attention easily. After just ten minutes of Danny's pleading to the Tuesday morning shoppers, one immaculately dressed agent had pulled up in a pure black car. So far, he hadn't made any movement for the gun in his belt.

"Tell me if I understand: a GHOST told you this? Strange how a ghost would want to prevent us from scrubbing the town of the energy he needs to haunt the human plane, don't you think?"

"Clockwork doesn't give a crap about the 'energy' in this world." Danny lunged forward, and his heart fell to his stomach as he watched the few members of his waning crowd shrink back. "He's trying to stop a disaster."

"Danny isn't lying," Sam shouted back before the man could answer. She brushed back the messy hair which half-covered her eyes. A wooly black coat was all she wore over her bat-decorated nightgown. "We're all in a lot of danger. You gotta call this off." She stepped up beside Danny on his turned over crate, fitting easily since Danny had taken to floating.

"Call me Agent Q, please," he adjusted the frame around his left ear, "and we've tested this extensively, little girl. It's perfectly safe for humans." One eyebrow shot up under his glasses, complementing the smile. "Your boyfriend might have a rougher time of it."

A handful of the people in the crowd looked forward, continuing down the street with lost interest.

"He's not just trying to save himself." Sam offered weakly.

A giant, bulky, orange figure took to the front. His hair was brushed to the wrong side, and a pink sleep mask was stuffed hastily into his front pocket. "Please, I'm a huge fan of you guys, but you gotta listen to him. We're in danger."

Maddie, Jazz, and Tucker, all with varying degrees of sleepwear and hair-curlers, nodded fervently from the back of the group.

"Yes, Mr. Fenton, I've been waiting to hear from you. What is your evidence? Do you have any reason to back Phantom's claim?"

"He's…He's…" Jack paled, eyes flitting to Danny. "I trust Phantom because…"

Danny inhaled sharply and took it upon himself to say what his father couldn't.

"Because I'm human too!" he snapped. It had barely been an hour since he revealed his secret to his parents, watching them scrunch up on their bed as he shifted before them. Desperation destroyed any desire he had to keep his secret. Just above the podium, he felt the rings pass his sides before the words were even out of his mouth, and watched with a bit of sadness as his parents flinched behind him. "I LIVE here. I'm ONE of you! I wouldn't lie. I wouldn't lie."

The suited man fell silent, until a low whistle broke past his lips.

"Amazing," he muttered. "I can only imagine the legal complications of this…next time we capture you."

Danny's mouth went dry. "There won't BE a next time! Not if you don't do something—"

_A human?_

_Wow…I didn't even think that was possible._

_He goes to school with my daughter. I know him! The Fenton's kid!_

_They'd do that to their own child…?_

Danny looked around, panic beating through his veins as everyone's focus shifted.

"Please…please believe me…"

_Wow, the ghost kid is human?_

_You sure he's not just a shape-shifter?_

Agent Q looked around, pleased, as the crowd's muttering grew louder.

"I got no reason to, kid. Sorry about your energy."

…

At 1:34 PM, the six of them sat scattered around the lab. Tucker leafed earnestly through pdf schematics of the GIW headquarters he'd stolen from the organization's server.

"All their gadgety stuff seems to be on the third and fourth floors." Tucker flipped a finger across his touch screen. "I bet this gas stuff's gotta be stored on one of those two floors. If you just got in through the window, Danny…"

"There's a ghost shield around the whole building, Tucker," Danny posed quietly.

"I can probably hack through that."

"And how much time would that take?"

Tucker scrunched his lips and thought. "Well your other timeline self pulled it off."

"I told you how that ended, Tuck…" Danny sat up straighter, hands running over each other.

"Hey, this is a different timeline isn't it?" Tucker's smile wobbled.

Before Danny could respond, Jack jumped up. "Hey, that stuff is probably running on some kind of ghost energy. What if we just expanded the ghost shield to the whole town? Block it out, you know? Mads and I could—"

"The shield doesn't have that kind of power, Jack," Maddie answered, legs crossing and uncrossing. She pressed her teeth gently into her bottom lip. "We'd risk short-circuiting it, but we could try connecting it with the power-source from the RV and amping it up right now and—"

"Or what if we just put a shield over the Guys in White? We'd use the RV." Jazz hopped off the table, panic and excitement shining in her eyes. "That could work, right? Block them _in_."

A few nods met her suggestion.

"Are you certain of any of this?" Danny asked into his chest, head hung.

"What's that?" Jazz swung her head around to Danny.

"Are any of you CERTAIN?!" Danny snapped, eyes burning. "You're killing me. You're ACTUALLY killing me here. How can you be so optimistic about this when we're 40 minutes away from calamity?!"

"Danny, what else are we supposed to do? If we lose hope now—"

"I'll tell you what we're supposed to do, Jazz—get the hell out of here. Run away, NOW." Danny hopped up, floating, eyes electric and fearful. "You know, you guys have it easy here. If you fail you all just get wiped out instantly with everyone else. End game. But me?" Danny thrust his thumb into his chest. "This stuff won't kill me. What kills a ghost?! I just gotta float here for the rest of eternity while my entire town decomposes. It'll be a literal corpse-fest and I gotta deal with that. I gotta deal with knowing I didn't save you."

"These are a lot of good ideas we're coming up with, Danny," Tucker whispered calmly. Danny pretended not to hear him.

"And then what do I do? Do I just dig as many graves as possible and roll you all into them before you start to rot? I can't do that with an entire town. Where do I go? Who do I have?"

A loud screech from outside cut him off. The six of them cupped their hands over the ears, their makeshift shields pierced by a deep, booming voice.

"Danny Phantom, you are under arrest for the kidnapping of five Amity citizens, and for conspiring to invade a government building. Surrender yourself along with the classified blueprints you possess. We have erected a ghost shield around your house; you have no escape."

Danny leapt to the ceiling, eyes wide with panic, and phased above ground.

"What are you doing?" he asked with a dangerous touch of insanity to his voice.

The agent, Q by the looks of it, lowered his megaphone. "Apprehending you. Surrender now, and no one gets hurt."

"You've got to be kidding me. You're about to gas the whole town and you're assuring ME you're not gonna hurt anyone?" Danny swung his arms out wide, met immediately with ten ectoguns pointed at his chest.

"Show us a little proof, huh? If not, you should come quietly—we've got you surrounded."

Danny only offered a loud, incredulous noise before he disappeared back into the concrete. A reactionary blast singed his left ear, taking a tuft of hair with it and leaving a patch of glowing skin visible behind his lobe. He hardly noticed it once he returned to the lab, looking around wildly, ignoring the shock on his family's face, before his eyes settled on the ghost portal.

"Come on, everyone in the Specter Speeder—we have to get out of here before—"

This time it was his mom's hand on his shoulder that stopped him.

"Relax, Danny. Just…relax." He could feel her hand trembling against his cold skin. "We've got a town to save you know. Who better than…than its own hero, right?"

"No!" Danny yanked himself away. "No we don't! You're not getting it. We're out of options."

"The RV could bust through that line of bozos in a second," Jack smiled as he answered. "I'll drive right through them, no matter how many of them are lined up outside right now."

"And then _what?" _Danny shot back.

"We race to their headquarters and drive straight through that building." Jack punched his right hand into his left. His smile quivered at the edges, hitching higher and lower with poor control. "We'll find what we're looking for if we just…"

_You tried, in the previous timeline. You were captured, locked away in their basement, just as the gas was released. Everyone who knew you were down in that locker died._

"No…" Danny muttered. "No we won't do that. I won't let you guys—" He shook his head. "I'm not supposed to invade their headquarters. That's not the future I'm headed for."

"Danny you're just wasting our time now," Sam said. She stood atop the far table, peering through the small skylight into the yard. After a beat of silence, she hopped back down, paler than usual. "Don't you get it? We're not going to abandon everyone for our own sake. That's not happening."

Something shifted deep in Danny's gut. His desperate panic vanished.

"And are you prepared to die, Sam?"

Surprise crossed her face for just a moment, but her eyebrows narrowed, mouth pressed into a firm line. Her arms folded over her chest. "Hell no," she answered with a smile.

"Good," was Danny's level response. He reached into his belt and removed a small, cylindrical metal tube. He clicked it, and it sprung to life, a barrel popping out of one end, a trigger folding under its belly.

He looked up at the deep crease between her eyebrows as they converged in the center of her forehead. Her mouth hung just open, and mild, cautious confusion widened her eyes.

"Sorry Sam," Danny muttered, gun raised, eyes focused.

Bam…

Sam lurched backward, confusion settled like a permanent mask as her eyes fell to the blooming red on her nightgown. A word or two bubbled through her throat, but blood muffled whatever she'd meant to say. Terrified betrayal gave Danny once last look before she fell forward, to her knees first, then the cold floor.

"DANNY!" Tucker shouted, jumping for the gun in a sudden fit of panic. Danny spun on him, eyes wild, and pointed.

"ARE YOU READY TO DIE, TUCKER?"

"We're not…DANNY WE'RE NOT GONNA DIE. WE'RE NOT GONNA DIE TODAY. BUT WHY? S-SAM…"

Bam.

This one took Tucker right between the eyes. He looked funny, both eyes crossed, as he watched the red trickle down his nose. He coughed once, subtly, before falling over.

"Danny…please. T-talk to me. Why are you…? Why would you…?"

He turned the pistol on Jazz, who recoiled, tears in her eyes.

"Sorry…"

Bam.

Boots stampeded overhead, and the lab door burst open, GIW flooding down the stairs.

Together, Maddie and Jack watched their daughter hit the ground. They looked up, past the gun, at Danny. Maddie didn't dare to breathe; her eyes had turned glassy and stretched unbelievably wide, a tremble in her lip. Jack wobbled and set his hand on her shoulder. The terror in their eyes was something Danny'd never seen.

"This isn't real," Jack whispered.

"Dad…are you going to die today?"

"No…" he shook his head. "Why would I…? Who—who'd kill me, Danny?"

A fourth shot. Jack staggered, falling only after a few seconds of lost uncertainty.

"PUT THE GUN DOWN!" the megaphone blasted—Q. It rung in Danny's ears, tilting his world sideways.

"Mom!" he shouted over the static in his own head. "Are these guys going to save you?"

The trembling woman said nothing. Her hand shifted to her back pocket, emerging with a palm-sized blaster.

"Good…y-you haven't given up," Danny said to himself. He could only assume she'd pulled a weapon; the tears pooling in his eyes blurred his vision. Everytime he blinked, they rushed back and took his sight again.

"PUT IT DOWN!" Q shouted, but he was drowned by the static in Danny's ears.

Danny didn't hear. In a flash, he's raised his hand.

Bam.

A sharp pain took out his left leg. He fell, mirroring his mom, as a crowd of a dozen white-suited men swarmed him. One of them jabbed his side with a taser of sorts, whose shock sent metallic convulsions spreading through his side. It lit like fire, and the aura around him fizzled to nothing. He felt rings sweep his side, and when he looked up, black hair blanketed his eyes.

Cuffs sprung around his wrist, tight and cold. They dug into his soft skin, which loosened his grip enough for one of his attackers to grab the gun. His neck ached as he raised his head, but no one bothered to stop him. His attackers had taken to scanning the room, their stances wide, heads swiveling left and right. Most clung to the ectogun they'd unsheathed from their side, held it to their chest like a shield. Several made a noise as their heads dropped and their eyes focused on the red seeping into their pantlegs.

Danny was hoisted to his feet by rough hands that seized his arms and yanked hard at both sockets. He felt something pop behind his shoulder blade, a quick stab of pain, but Danny held his silence.

"You're under arrest for murder," a voice said distantly. The words were wispy and quiet, like the speaker hardly believed his won words. "You have the right to remain silent…"

Danny didn't bother to listen; his attention stayed frozen on the agents who slowly spread around the lab. Their heads bobbed like pendulums, left, right, left, as though their necks had come unhinged, taking in body after body. Their mouths parted slightly, eyes blinking quickly behind dark shades. Whatever they'd expected to find, five dead bodies wasn't it.

The voice droned on without him. Danny shifted his head over his shoulder, and stared instead into the glassy violet eyes that watched him from the floor. One of the agents jolted him into motion, pulling him up by his socket so hard his feet barely touched the ground. Very little of his own power went into ascending his basement stairs. Danny only remained fixed on the lifeless betrayal reflected in purple nothing as he disappeared from sight.

…

Twenty-five silent minutes passed inside the GIW vehicle. Danny had been strapped in the back middle seat, situated between Q and a blond man he didn't recognize. Both kept their pistols in their hands, and they tensed their grip around the trigger every time Danny's cuffs jangled.

"You won't reconsider?" Danny whispered. "Won't even delay it…in case?"

"Keep quiet."

"Shouldn't matter to me though, should it? Who else—"

"I said keep quiet." It was the blond man again who spoke.

Danny pulled his hands as far apart as they'd go—only a few inches—until the chain went taut. Brushed against his left temple, Danny felt the cold steel of a gun connect with his skin.

"…Are you going to kill me?" Danny asked after a silent moment.

"Not if I don't have to. All those ethical dilemmas with you being human?—down the drain now. Only a ghost would kill its whole family like that…we _will _make use of you."

"…You sound so disgusted." Danny snorted quietly. "Oh the irony."

The gun pushed harder into his head, forcing his neck to tilt to the right like a confused dog. With his gaze shifted, Danny was forced to stare at the neon green 2:17 winking from the dashboard.

"You've got one minute left guys…hope it doesn't hurt."

"I'll be sure to treasure it," Q quipped and let his gun drop a little.

With no warning, it was jammed right back into Danny's head.

"Hey! I didn't even move, guy. Why are y—"

"What are you doing?!" Q wheezed. His breath came in scratchy huffs, and his lips had turned ghostly pale.

"What did I—? Well _I _didn't do anything…"

2:18

Just as quickly, the gun went slack against his head. The blond agent now spun on him, hand fumbling weakly for the gun. Danny's own breath stuttered in his throat. He sucked in a rasping gulp of thin air. It didn't hurt, but it made his head swim just a little.

With just five seconds to prepare, the driver lost control. They drilled head-first into the car ahead of them, a small buggy, which shot forward, wheels skidding off the road. The impact launched Danny toward the front seats, and his head smashed into the metal grate separating him from the driver.

Their car broke off at an angle, careened to the left, and dove into a tail spin. Colors spun past the windows until their left side collided bluntly with a lone telephone pole and they stopped entirely.

The wind had been knocked clean out of him, stars blinking in his eyes as his head swam. He felt the distinct trickle of blood run through his right eyebrow. Something heavy rested on his left shoulder.

Danny's eyes refocused on his left side, on the head that rested on his shoulder, Agent Q. His mouth hung open just slightly, the glasses cracked in both lenses.

Danny let the man fall when he unbuckled himself, and watched as Q stopped three-quarters of the way down, held up by his own seat belt. The boy's eyes shifted to the driver, whose head was pressed firmly to the steering wheel, leaking a viscous red across the whole front. The same red was splattered across the windshield.

To his right, the blond Agent looked nearly perfect. Only his glasses had been thrown from his face, revealing two glassy, pale-green eyes. They were dulled, doll-like, vacant.

He'd seen that look far too many times in the last hour.

Danny snaked his hand back around, rifling quickly through Q's pocket and emerging with a set of keys and his own confiscated gun. With his mouth, Danny worked the key into his cuffs, biting hard enough to twist the metal around. A distant click rewarded his efforts, and the shackles fell away with ease. He gave the men one last glance before phasing himself through the door, transforming as he did so.

He found himself floating on the side of a mountain, winding road etched into its side, headed for the GIW headquarters. Several other cars had collided with the mountainside, a lucky few were stopped by telephone poles, others had rolled right down the side, settling into the valley below. Danny could just make out a red Jeep propped on its side against a backyard swing set.

The acrid smell of burned tire assaulted his nose. Car alarms shrieked from the distance. Smoke drifted in lazy puffs off the engine of Q's car, like a campfire that stunk of gasoline. Danny coughed, and felt the tickle of sweat roll down his neck. In cold October, the burning cars ignited the air.

From inside his belt pocket, Danny unhooked his phone. He flicked it open, eyes falling to the three numbers displayed on the home screen.

2:20.

He set his attention on the Nasty Burger sign in the distance, erected 30 feet above the chaos unfolding in the streets, just a pinprick, and he focused only on it as he took to the skies. He didn't look at the hundreds of cars smashed into the stores lining the roadsides, the limp figures criss-crossing the sidewalks. He saw the Nasty Burger, only the Nasty Burger.

Five minutes of flying brought him close enough to make out the Fentonworks sign to the east. He cut his path quickly and turned head-on into the wind. The whirring in his ears grew deafening; it drowned out his own thoughts.

Ten minutes in, he set his feet down at the corner of Crescent and Harlind. His whole body stung from the cold; his hair had been whipped backwards. Knots dominated his bangs, but Danny wasted only a moment to push his hair back into place. His attention had gone to the police cars littering the street.

They hugged the corner around his house, whining loudly, flashing red and blue, waiting for owners who weren't coming back. Danny stepped over the blue-clad figures that had collapsed to the ground.

There, in the open-backed ambulances. Danny peered inside of the ones laden with zipped black bags. He thrust the doors open wider so they thumped with recoil. His hands snaked inside, grabbed the bags one by one.. He lifted each bag out by its shoulders, and carried it bridal style down into the lab. With the first bag he brought down, Danny glanced up, surprised to see Jazz still lying prone in her own blood. She alone had remained undisturbed in the lab, likely, Danny assumed, because she was the farthest from the stairs and therefore the last for the police to reach.

Once the other three had been brought into the lab, Danny unzipped each bag, hoisted each body out, and set them back into their own pool of blood. A blue hazmat suit, stained dark in the front. An orange one, red and wet just below the jawline. A dark nightgown, hiding the gruesome secret. A white band t-shirt, blood plain as day. All humanly warm. Danny laid them each down and sat at the center of them.

He raised his hands, snapping twice as energy sparked between his thumb and middle fingers. The thin blanket of ecto-energy that leapt into the air faded quickly, consumed by some unseen force. It had gotten much harder to breathe; Danny could feel the rasp in his chest.

The sirens outside bled together, distant, in another world, as Danny snapped his fingers again and again. He switched hands, switched fingers, drew sparks from one hand to the next. It made him light-headed. With every snap, he could feel the energy dying away.

His eyes lighted with interest, hope, when the drying blood encircling Tucker leeched a toxic green. Simmering bubbles grabbed at the air, popping and reforming again and again. They stuck together, lifting as one being from the puddle.

A deep bullet-wound pierced the thing's forehead, its dull green eyes swung around the room, sleepy, confused, until they fell to its own transparent hands rising from the ground.

"_How…H-How?" _its voice echoed. Instant fear clouded its face, and aghast horror dropped its mouth nearly to the floor. "_That's me. That's _me. _How'd I? Oh man…Oh man I…"_

It spun, blinking, before finding Danny at the center of it all.

"_You killed me. You…KILLED me." _Tucker rose up, feet off the ground. "_I'm never gonna…I'm never gonna…Why? H-how COULD you?"_

"I saved you," Danny answered dimly. His eyes slid shut and snapped back open. "You'd be a lifeless husk if I didn't."

"_Everyone?…Everyone…When?"_ The newly-formed ghost collapsed, eyes to its shaking hands. "_We coulda…We coulda saved them"_

"No. We couldn't have."

Sparking tendrils of green rose beside Jazz, twirling together and rising like a plant from the water. It took form slowly, long, pale hair falling down its back.

"Welcome back," Danny said.

The new ghost shot its head up, instantly noticing Danny. A hole pierced its left side.

_"What…what happened? What happened to me?" _It swallowed hard. "_The gun Danny…Y-you—"_

"Yes, I killed you." Danny slumped a little lower, shock and fatigue getting the better of him. "I just went through this with Tucker. You'd have been wiped out with everyone else."

_"Every—it happened, then? Did we…Did we save anyone?"_

Danny shook his head, unsure what to do about the building cry in his sister's throat.

Maddie and Jack rose from their own bodies next. Maddie, despite dying after him, rose before Jack. With a transparent palm, Maddie tried to offer her aide to Jack. He reached for her, and his hand slid right through hers.

They said nothing, eyes scanning the room with immediate understanding. If they were disappointed in Danny, they didn't have the composure to show it.

"Everyone is dead,"Danny told them for good measure. "You guys are probably going to have a hard time staying here for long. You need the ectoplasm in the air." Danny snapped his fingers a few times, creating just a few dying sparks. "I'm not gonna last much longer doing this. The stuff keeps eating up my energy. Ghost zone's right there."

_"What's town look like?" _Tucker asked quietly, his eyes wide and scared. _"Not everyone…My parents are. They can't…"_

Danny shrugged his shoulders, ghost form slipping away. He fell, fully solid, to the floor, shoes soaking in the seeping legs folded beneath him, which he accepted without a fight. Something hard stabbed him in the thigh, and he shifted to pull it out of his pocket. The gun, the small pistol he'd lifted from Skulker just a few hours ago, right before waking Sam. A last resort. A complete, utter, last resort.

He leaned over and pressed his thumb into the button on the portal's side. It slid open with a pneumatic huff.

"Come on, I can't keep supporting you here." Danny tried snapping his fingers once or twice, numb at this point, with only a tiny spark jumping between them. "I'm pretty drained."

_"What about Sam?"_ Tucker asked, his voice a distant echo.

Danny turned back, focus set on her empty eyes.

"Come on," he repeated, setting his foot over the portal's threshold. He held the side open like an elevator door. "You guys aren't going to last long there."

_"My…My parents, dude. They could still be…What if we can save them? I gotta try Danny. I gotta go see."_

But with all the resolve in the ghost's voice, it still drifted toward the open portal, as though drawn. Danny didn't argue with it as it passed him.

"It's worse isn't it?…On this side of the situation?" Danny slid his hand down the side, letting it drop completely. "Guess that was pretty selfish of me, huh? Keeping you guys here."

Tucker wobbled in the air, nearly flipping over as he drifted, aimlessly, across the portal's barrier. His lips moved over and over, shocked nothing in his eyes, and his foot phased right through the metal frame without his notice.

Jack and Maddie tried walking, but their feet slipped through the floor with every step. They gave up quickly, mirroring each other, as they let their legs rise into the air. Maddie froze, her momentum dragging her a bit forward, to look down at Sam's body.

_"We should wait for her, Danny…" _Maddie whispered into the floor, and she ran one pale hand over Sam's cheek.

When Maddie looked up, Danny had disappeared inside the ghost zone, a spot of white in the distance. Tucker flanked him, behind and to the right. The three remaining ghosts picked up speed to catch them, unsteady in their new bodies.

Danny looked back once—only once—to see each of their faces. Jazz's eyes were distant; she floated just behind Maddie, her hand snaking out instinctually to grasp her mother and phasing through each time. Maddie never noticed the disturbance—her face had been robbed of any awareness. Black blood stained her chin like freckles, and the fervor in her eyes had been wiped clean.

Jack, by far, was the scariest. The gentle arch to his eyebrows that kept his face open and goofy was gone. Dark shadows consumed his eyes, bleak defeat drawing down on his jaw. Jack without his energetic spark was scary.

Tucker had separated from the group. He floated too far to the left, then the right, whether because he couldn't control his body or because he didn't care to, Danny didn't know. The entire Fenton family had been saved. Of the Foleys, only Tucker remained. Pure shock dominated his lifeless face.

Danny could feel the defeat and exhaustion in his own face, and he fought down the part of him that nagged to examine the missing face.

Violet eyes. Betrayal. Shock.

No. Danny shook his head.

It was done.

…

Clockwork answered the door before Danny had the chance to knock. The sight of the four ghosts flanking Danny didn't seem to shock him. He motioned inward, shifting out of the way as Danny coaxed everyone inside.

"Vlad's alive you know," Danny spouted suddenly. His eyes dimmed, quickly realizing he had no reason to celebrate that.

Maddie and Jack looked up quickly. "How?" Jack whispered.

Danny twisted to Clockwork. "He is…right?"

Clockwork nodded in answer, the topic dead.

A small whimper caught Danny's attention. He glanced over his shoulder, finding Tucker's ghost huddled in front of Clockwork's portal, which flipped quickly through the town. A house. A street. Silence. Stillness. And the bodies.

Violet eyes.

"Clockwork is…there's gotta be somewhere in the ghost zone we can stay, right?" Danny rose a little higher in the air like he hoped to look through a window. "A lair…t-their own lairs maybe, right?"

Clockwork shook his head slowly. "I wouldn't bother making that a priority." He thrust his staff out, motioning down the hallway. "There are far too many unused rooms in this castle."

He adjusted his staff, now pointing at the portal, and flicked it off with a twitch of his wrist, which startled Tucker's flighty ghost.

"They'll adjust…with time," Clockwork added. His attention lingered on the remnants of Danny's family, Tucker included, but there had been no conviction in his voice.

Danny hardly listened; his eyes were glued to the now-empty portal, which, for a split second, had shown the scene he had caused. The lab, five bodies spread across the floor. Only one had faced the eye of the portal.

Violet.

"_You're going back for Sam, right?_" Tucker spoke into the ground, as though he'd read Danny's thoughts. His voice was strained and distant.

"In time…" Danny shut his eyes to the relief on Tucker's face. "I-I'll go back to bury her with the rest of you."

"_…Where's her ghost?"_ Earnestness cut through his voice. A simple, honest question.

Danny turned his head to the time ghost. "Could you bring it up? The moment I…I pulled the gun out?" His eyes flickered to the portal. "I need to see…when she got it."

Clockwork hesitated, a beat of silence, before conjuring the scene with a small nod of his head. At the center of the portal, six people formed. Two sat, Jazz in a chair, Tucker on the table. Jack leaned against a shelf, Maddie with her elbows propped on a lab bench. The Danny in the portal fidgeted, hand pulling the gun from his side, and raised it to the only person fully supporting herself.

Confusion knotted Sam's eyebrows together, but for just a moment, Danny saw it: a jump in the wrinkle of her forehead. The shock was there, the confusion and betrayal, but at that moment, she looked…aware.

_Bam…_

Danny collapsed on the ground as he watched, hardly supporting his head above his lap. A noise halfway between a laugh and a sob bubbled out of his throat.

"I love that about Sam, you know? She…she always got it. Always got me." He sucked in a stuttering breath. "Couldn't fool her…not even for the second I needed to pull the trigger."

_"Danny, where's Sam?"_ Tucker asked just a bit louder. He bit hard on his own lip to keep it steady.

"You know what makes a ghost, Tucker? Someone who's not ready to die." He dared to look at Tucker. "You all…You all couldn't believe I'd just kill you. No matter how many of you I already shot…even Mom at the end…you didn't think I could kill you."

Maddie raised a hand to the bullet wound imprinted on her chest. Her hand trembled, tracing the jagged tears in her hazmat suit. She said nothing.

"But Sam got it. She was the first to go down and she already knew…She was gonna die…" He put his head down and laughed a hollow, desperate laugh. "Did she know what I was doing? Did she trust me? Trust that whatever _I _was doing made sense?

"Or maybe…maybe she'd just been ready to die for Amity Park. And when I shot her…" Danny let his head shake, "she'd just thought I'd gone insane."

He laughed into the silence like a man who'd just let the last of his sanity slip away.

"Sam you can't leave me on that cliffhanger! Can't…leave me." His smile warped into a broken quiver. "…She's…not here, is she, Clockwork?"

Clockwork only stared back in return, but the silence helped no one.

"No, she's not." he finally conceded. "Her timeline's ended."

"Of course…" Danny slipped the silver gun out from his side. "But I knew that."

Clockwork stepped forward and lifted the time medallion from Danny's neck; he took the gun next for good measure, uncurling Danny's fingers one by one.

"You did her a service."

Danny looked up blankly; his focus traveled to the four terrified pairs of eyes. When he spoke, guilt cut his voice. "How?"

Clockwork raised the medallion to the portal, and a few scenes flashed by in rapid succession.

"You left last night before I could tell you much about the timeline I stopped today."

Danny watched him with growing disinterest, the hope dying drawn face. "I don't think it's worth hearing about anymore." A spark jumped into his eyes. "U-unless I can redo this? I can save her. I can."

"You can't set a timeline right just by living through it time and time again, Danny. You'd destroy yourself."

"At this point, I don't ca—"

"Would you just abandon these people here?" Clockwork swept a hand out. "They've become your responsibility."

"You've gotta…gotta let me save her. Please. I need—"

"You wouldn't be able to save her, Danny. It's happened already. You've already left your mark on it. Even if I could send you back through it, every natural force would work against you. The push to this end—"

"What's to stop me from jumping right through that portal now?"

"Common sense, I would hope."

Danny blindsided Clockwork as he thrust his fist into the time ghost's face. Clockwork reeled backwards, red eyes wide in surprise.

"Common sense?! I can't even THINK right now when…" he swallowed, and as his own shock wore off, ice rushed through his stomach. "…when she's dead. I did that. I could've just…taken her out of town. Before any of this. Before the Guys in White surrounded my home, I shoulda…"

"Danny, listen to me: you did her a favor."

"How? I _shot her!_"

"Which, for her, is better than how you left her in the other timeline."

Danny collapsed to the ground, legs folded into his chest. "You already told me everyone died in that timeline. What's the difference?"

"Everyone who knew you had stormed the Guys in White building died, Danny. That's what I said."

"…And Sam?"

"Escaped town. She survived."

Danny's head shot up, mouth dry, eyes quivering with the ring in his ears. "She survived?…She would have survived?"

"In that timeline, she told her parents about the disaster. They forced her into the car and drove away. Her father's not that strong, but he's certainly stronger than she is."

Danny curled his hands together so tightly he could feel his nails biting through the gloves. "I…I really did kill her then…It really was my fault."

"And she'd have thought the same about you." Clockwork quieted Danny with a sweep of his hand. "All of Amity died that day without her. She'd been whisked out of town. She couldn't save anyone. She couldn't save you. Why do you think she was so ready to die for you today?"

"I…don't…"

"Because abandoning her town for her own life would have destroyed her. Her entire life would have been empty, only worth living because of the hope that she might find YOU. But deep in that cellar, no amount of ghost hunting equipment could detect you. In the past timeline, she exhausted her natural life searching for you. Living, Danny, is a burden."

Danny's eyes shifted to the portal, which projected a hazy image of a hunched over woman. He straggly hair had gotten too long, her face lined and tired. In her hands she held a quietly blinking boomerang. She looked up, toward Fentonworks, and tossed it.

It clattered to the ground.

"You saved her from a life of regrets."

Danny stood up with a trembling push of his hand against the floor. Shaking legs brought him to the portal, where he ran a hand over the holographic image.

The image vanished as Clockwork approached from behind. "Dying is much easier than living. And now, you've taken the difficult role."

"There's…so there's no way I can see her?"

"Nothing good comes of selfishness." The portal winked awake, this time, Danny saw his own face. Electric green eyes stared back, drained, underlined with dark shadows. His skin was pale, and his hair had tangled terribly on his head. He put a hand to his hair, watching the image mirror him.

"This time, it's you who has to keep going" Clockwork stepped away from the portal, "For the people you brought here, for the people whose memory you possess—for her—you have no choice but to continue."

The image inside the portal gave a half-hearted smile.

"You have to carry the burden of living."


End file.
